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What People Say About Us

Authors

The team there is phenomenal. In decades of writing books I have never dealt with people in publishing who have been as unfailingly capable and nice.

—Jan M. Ziolkowski (Harvard University)

Open Book Publishers has been the ideal collaborator for Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy. The OBP team has been impeccable throughout, with meticulous editing, helpful suggestions, and continual support through the process, including in helping us to achieve our ambitious publishing timeline. I can hardly believe that less than a year after the completion of the lecture series, OBP has published all the thirty-four chapters in three beautiful volumes. I do believe that the project as a whole has the potential to have a significant impact on Dante Studies and on lay appreciation of the poem, but it the open platform model of OBP which gives the greatest chance of making this a reality. Thank you!

—George Corbett (University of St Andrews)

I was really pleased with the work that you all did on mine and Paul’s book (‘Just Managing?’). Very professional, very attentive to detail and in the end a very good product.

—Mark O'Brien (University of Liverpool)

I can say, without a shred of doubt, that my experience with Open Book Publishers has been nothing short of excellent. For reference/comparison: I’ve published three other books with Cambridge UP, Bloomsbury and Palgrave. In all respects, OBP were at least as good, if not better in some areas, than some of the others. A few areas are worth commenting upon:

1. The peer-review was excellent in terms of both rigour and speed. It was relatively quick and they kept me informed throughout when one of the reviewers asked for a deadline extension. When I did receive the reports (of which there were three—more than on any of my other books)—the feedback was constructive and clearly from people who knew the field.

2. Production. This was another great experience. The copyediting was done by an academic (I think she is a postdoc at Cambridge) and was extremely thorough. It was also done in a timely fashion. Cover designs and typeset proofs were also extremely quick. Finally, the whole thing will be out this/next week. I only delivered the final manuscript last month. It is fantastic not to have to wait ages for a book to be published.

I managed to get Birkbeck to fund the Book Processing Charge and I don’t regret it at all. I’d publish with them again.

—Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London)

The world of publishing can be incredibly daunting for a first-time book author. Before coming across OBP, I recall waiting weeks or months at a time simply to receive an acknowledgment from publishing houses; often being ultimately met with not-so-constructive responses about the project. Working with OBP has been completely refreshing: timely responses; feedback that is both helpful and respectful of the author's voice; open-access ideals that are incredibly important in an academic arena that, more often than not, excludes rather than shares. It has been a privilege working with OBP and I am so very glad that my first book has found its home here.

—Nandita Dinesh (UWC-USA, New Mexico)

I have excellent memories of an outstanding (and exacting) copy-editor at Harvard, from whom I learned much, and an extremely helpful and co-operative editor at Chicago, but nowhere have I encountered the degree of responsiveness, the generous support, the personal engagement of the founder-editors of Open Book Publishers—themselves university teachers—and their staff. I have now published four books with this press and in each case, communication among us was frequent, easy, open, and produced results. At a time when it is easy to be cynical about university presses and the way they are fulfilling—or not fulfilling—the objectives for which they were originally set up, Open Book is a beacon of optimism, encouragement, and confidence in the value and future of scholarly inquiry, writing, and exchange. It is high time that university appointment and tenure committees, university libraries, and scholarly journals recognized the role this adventurous and innovative not-for-profit press is playing, especially in the humanities, and that its procedures for the selection of manuscripts submitted to it are as rigorous as those of any university press. I believe that Open Book Publishers is the way of the future in scholarly publishing. It is already expanding rapidly and I am glad to see that. Still, selfishly, I hope that expansion will not erode the feeling those who have worked with it have of being part of a family of scholars, rather than a business.

— Lionel Gossman (Princeton)

Open Book has enabled me to experiment with a new genre: textbooks on classical authors that enable research-led teaching at school level. The key factor to make this work is speed: because these books are written in reaction to examination boards setting new texts from time to time, the turn-around between initial impulse and final product is, ideally, under a year. OBP has risen magnificently to this challenge. World-class readers who operate at the speed of light vet the final drafts (sixteen pages of detailed comments on a manuscript of 300+ pages within three days, anybody?), before the production team works its own magic, transforming the manuscripts into beautiful volumes within six weeks.

—Ingo Gildenhard (King's College, Cambridge)

From initial proposal submission to final delivery of the manuscript, Open Book Publishers was a pleasure to work with. Time is of the essence when publishing in a field as fast-moving as the digital humanities, but scholarly publishing is typically a tortuously slow process. OBP was a welcome surprise, whose swift and efficient processes ensured timely publication without ever sacrificing quality or scholarly rigour. The comprehensive peer review was efficiently coordinated within a matter of two months. In a publishing world where many presses no longer bother with anything beyond "light" copy-editing, OBP enlisted three copy-editors to pore over the manuscript. Direct correspondence with the design and production teams guaranteed that everyone was pleased with the final result. With all this added attention, the entire process took less time than any other academic publishing project I've ever worked on. Best of all, the whole book is available to read for free online, allowing a global readership to access and critically engage with our work, while simultaneous publication in print satisfies the requirements of even the most hardened tenure and promotion committees. I wholeheartedly recommend publishing with Open Book Publishers.

—Brett D. Hirsch (University of Western Australia)

Open Book Publishers works just like the most distinguished academic publishers—except, that is, for making scholarship available to a vastly larger audience. The review process for my book was just as stringent as that which my previous books have undergone from Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses. I received critical reports from two anonymous referees who were clearly expert in my field. OBP worked closely with me on the design for the book, with splendid results. Their production process was efficient and far quicker than that of a traditional publisher. The number of readers who have accessed the book in the six months since publication is already four times the sales of my previous book, which was published in 2009.

—J. David Velleman (New York University)

From the time I sent in my manuscript, the editors at Open Book Publishers responded quickly and respectfully. While it took some months for the outside reader reports, OPB quickly thereafter offered to accept the MS for publication. From that point on I worked with them in a collegial and collaborative atmosphere to prepare the final text. From the graphic designs of the front and back covers, to the manner in which photos and links were to be displayed in the text, there was a very creative interaction to come up with the best possible presentation. The actual editing was also a matter of cooperating to produce a clear scholarly work, with the electronic manuscript being sent back and forth in a timely fashion through several phases of proofreading. Finally, our collaboration with the World Oral Literature Project not only placed the book in an exciting new series but also enabled us to create links to the subtitled videos of the narrative performances that I had analyzed, a nearly unique innovation that augmented the depth of the project. Throughout, my experience was one of working with enthusiastic colleagues who understood the production process and the importance of making solid scholarship available to the widest possible readership. Compared to interactions I’ve had with other academic and private presses, Open Book was a deeply appreciated breath of fresh air.

—Robert Cancel (University of California, San Diego)

Journals

I would also like to praise the publishing politics of this volume: Open Book Publishers helpfully makes all of their volumes available free of charge as e-books (see www.openbookpublishers.com/product/294).

—Ainsley Morse, SEEJ, 62:3 (2018)

The study is also unusual as a publication. The publisher makes it available in various formats—digital and print—and one of the digital versions is offered gratis in both PDF and HTML. The digital versions have a major advantage over the print because many of the illustrations discussed are available only online.

However, one feature of this book outweighs all other considerations: it is available online entirely free. Potential readers merely have to access the web site of Open Book Publishers to find it. This publishing firm was co-founded by Alessandra Tosi, who is its managing director and is herself a specialist in 19th century Russian fiction. Open Book’s innovative approach must point the way forward to making academic research accessible to a much wider audience and is to be highly commended.

In the Land of the Romanovs is remarkable not only for its thoroughness, but also for its innovation and accessibility. The decision to develop the project as a digital resource means that any omissions can be rectified. In addition to Open Book Publishers’ usual open access policy, which means that the book can be read in full on their website and embedded into other websites, a "socially enhanced” edition, to which readers can contribute links to digitized texts and catalogues, expanded descriptions and new entries, is hosted by Wikiversity (www.openbookpublishers.com/product/268). This is a truly exciting and admirable initiative that transforms this project from a useful sourcebook into an invaluable database that should become a model for other scholars to emulate and develop.

The book can now be read online, or downloaded as a free e-book or pdf. In its new form, the book is a gift given to us anew and, more importantly, given freely to the continent whence it came. According to the Open Book website, Finnegan’s book has been accessed more in Africa than anywhere else in the world.

I would like to draw readers' attention to Open Book Publishers' praiseworthy practice of offering a free download of all their publications [from their website] to promote the dissemination of culture [...]

Copyright fees normally push open access publishing outside the realm of possibility for historians of art and visual culture, so Piety is a proof of concept in format as well as content. [...] One of [Rudy’s] most courageous claims is that the exorbitant cost of permission fees effectively censored the research she undertook and distorted the findings she published. [...] In Piety, she names and shames research libraries that prohibit photography or charge unreasonable fees for photography and academic permission fees. Although her objects are self-evidently out-of-copyright, reproduction fees ranged from ‘an artisanal latte’ to ‘more than my car’ (p. xiv). Scholars of book history, medieval manuscripts, and medieval art owe Rudy an immense debt, and not just in an academic sense. She also praises explicitly: she acknowledges Cambridge University Library for allowing her to cover digitization costs of material that it then added to its own online collection. [ . . . ] Of all of [Rudy's contributions], shouting the hushed whispers about the costs of undertaking research on visual material might be the bravest.

Warwick Gould deserves our sincere thanks, and congratulations for his continual research into new media, and ensuring the provision of the Yeats Annual to as wide a readership as possible. Warwick has taken the Yeats Annual to new heights in cooperation with Open Book Publishers. With options to purchase a paperback; hardback; epub or mobi,or download a free pdf copy. (https://www.openbookpublishers.com). Open Book Publishers provide an important service to literature, learning and thereby erudition. I have personal experienced demands from publishers for ridiculous sums to reproduce short passages from books. In one case, the demand was for $1,155. 00 to reproduce a chapter. A tax on knowledge, to say the least.